EDITORS' CORNER
OPINION
Yale University’s new hire to teach about anti-Jewish hatred harbors animosity towards Christians.
Professor Magda Teter is visiting campus this semester to serve as the scholar-in-residence for the university’s Program for the Study of Antisemitism. Teter, a Fordham University scholar, currently co-directs her own school’s Judaic studies program.
“We live in troubled times, in the times where hateful rhetoric and even violence are normalized,” Teter said during a recent lecture.
“Times when it is difficult to have conversations about difficult topics, to face the past and the present,” she told attendees, according to the Yale Daily News. “Times when it is really increasingly difficult to disagree with one another.”
Those are certainly accurate thoughts, but they lose meaning when we realize they are coming from a bigot.
You see, Teter blames Christians for hatred in the world today. And not just modern day Christians, but also the Apostle St. Paul.
“The concept of Jewish servitude and hierarchy emerges from Paul’s epistles,” Teter wrote in a 2023 essay. She came back to this theme in a book called “Christian Supremacy: Reckoning With the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism.”
In the book, she argues “modern rejection of Jewish and Black equality” can be traced “to an enduring Christian heritage of exclusion, intolerance, and persecution.”
“The ideology espoused by white supremacists in the US and in Europe is rooted in Christian ideas of social and religious hierarchy,” she wrote.
For a Yale scholar, Teter also suffers from a lack of knowledge of Christianity. This is particularly concerning since her whole shtick is centered around that Christians are responsible for modern-day antisemitism. (Nary a word about Muslims from Ms. Teter).
In her 2023 essay, where she accuses Trump of being both antisemitic and a racist for linking leftwing New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg to George Soros, Teter shows a stunning ignorance of the Enlightenment.
She wrote:
Enlightenment thinkers, living and writing at the height of the transatlantic slave trade—even those most revered in Western intellectual history, such as Voltaire, David Hume, and Emanuel Kant—embraced the idea of the racial inferiority of non-Europeans, especially Africans (Voltaire even espoused polygenism) and used it to justify their enslavement. At the same time, European Jews, even those who had lived in Europe for over a millennium, were de-Europeanized and called “orientals” or “Asiatics.” When the French Revolution arrived with its slogans of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” Jews in Europe and Black people in European colonies tested the sincerity of these ideals.
It certainly is true that Jews and black people were unjustly treated.
But insofar as it was French Revolutionaries and so-called “freethinkers” who were espousing hatred, that does not indict Christians. After all, both the Enlightenment and the French Revolution were deeply anti-Catholic. By Teter’s logic, it is not Christians that are responsible for antisemitism, but liberals, like her.
And what about St. Paul’s famous words about equality before God?
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” he writes in Galatians.
Teter must have missed that Bible verse while she was looking for phantom examples of racism.
No one should be treated differently because of their race or religion, but by setting up Christians as the enemy, Professor Teter only furthers divisiveness.
MORE: White supremacy goes back to ‘early church,’ Oxford professor claims
